Mac Backup Nirvana with Encryption, Per-File, and Snapshotting
October 15, 2009 2:54 PM 
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Mac Backup Filter: Help me achieve Nirvana with Time Machine, FileVault, and a snapshotting tool. Difficulty rating: FileVault and virtual machine images.
I've been trying to get all my ducks in a row with backup from my Macbook. I have enough space to back things up to, and currently have TimeMachine and Carbon Copy Cloner set up.
I'm not tied to any of these pieces of software. For a TimeMachine replacement, I'd be fine with something that ran in the background and had an even moderately friendly interface for restoration. For snapshots and cloning, I'm willing to pay for SuperDuper if it makes any of this easier, or any other piece of software, for that matter. I'm open to things involve a significant degree of hackery to set up as long as they're transparent and mostly fool proof past that.
Problem 1: I'd love to use FileVault, but I really never log out. Is there any good way to get transparent encryption working for myself without changing my daily use patterns? My second concern with this is the fact that TimeMachine doesn't really work well in this situation, from what I've found, lacking the ability to restore individual files. I'm fine with unencrypted backups in this situation.
Problem 2: Unmounting the drives when I take the laptop away from the desk. Is there a method for only mounting the drive for use when TimeMachine's open? I'd prefer something that automatically mounted the drive when TimeMachine was running, and unmounted afterwards, and similarly for browsing backups for recovery. It's the same situation with Carbon Copy Cloner.
Problem 3: VMWare Images. Backing up big binary blobs doesn't strike me as the Best Practice way to do this. I know I can break the disk images up into discrete chunks, but even then it doesn't really solve the problem.
Problem 4: With two different backup schemes (per file, and snapshot) the processes sometimes like to run over each other and slow each other down. A Perfect Solution would avoid this.
Problem 5: The snapshot/clone looks like it's using rsync on the backend, which chews up way more time generating the file list over the drive than it does comparing files or actually backing up. Is there a way around this? I can't imagine that in the days of things like inotify the only way to get changed files is by checking every file.
Any even partial solutions to any of these problems is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
posted by rcs to computers & internet (1 comment total)
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Re: Problem 5, using SuperDuper's (proprietary?) sync algorithm for my home snapshot, the whole thing (looking for changes and copying the files) takes about 10 minutes for my home folder, which contains ~200,000 files (150GB). I do this once a week, and it typically updates something like 1-5GB of files. I have no idea if this is fast or slow relative to rsync though.
posted by caek at 6:18 AM on October 16